17 September 2006

Vampire. Teeth.

One of my front teeth was loose. It's a recurring theme. In dream interpretation books (which seem to be about as accurate as anyone who puts random meaning behind a list of nouns) losing teeth means impending financial loss. More reasonable folk say it's more likely I'm grinding my teeth at night. In any case, the tooth came out. I reached into my mouth to take the tooth out, and found my mouth full of parts of the tooth. The tooth had come apart like the layers of an onion.

Saturday morning is always a fertile time for semi-lucid dreaming. This time I dreamed a long story about my life as a vampire. As the lore went, vampires were the etheric bodies of deceased individuals who had the tenacity, or wisdom, or intelligence to avoid the "second death". When someone died -- someone obscure -- I took over their body. This time it was the body of a hobo who had wandered out of the cold into a rest home hoping for handouts. He died sitting in the rest home's lobby.

The first thing I realized when I took over the hobo's recently-deceased body was that the man had liked to smoke Marbarlo Reds. His throat was a mess. I thought I'd work with that to make my voice an impressive rumble. Vampires, after inhabiting the host corpse, pull energy from the etheric to restart the body's vital organs and tissue. This energy is also used to reshape the body, make it grow younger, and during the time as a vampire, this energy is also the body's sole source of substance (and in the original vampire mythology, blood has nothing to do with it -- it's energy).

In vampire terminology, I was an "Archlord" (actually, I was a demi-god masquerading as an Archlord -- I'm typically a megalomaniac in dreams -- and I was masquerading because anything with "god" in it garners too much attention). Because I was an Archlord, I could achieve the physical transformation of the host corpse into whatever image I desired within a very short time. (As an interesting side note, fat corpses are preferable for this, because during the transformation, energy can be pulled from the stored fat instead of just through the etheric.)

So now I had a body to my liking and I was all set to go out, find my daylight hiding space (which turned out to be a broom closet. Vampires hide from the sun because the solar energy interferes with the etheric. A lot of this lore is actually verifiable Occult if anyone has a care to look it up.)

That's just the beginning. I'm not going to reproduce the entire dream here (it was most entertaining, but long and detailed.) I will add a little detail from a later flashback on the occurrence that led to my becoming an Archlord:

Weres are the arch-nemisis of vampires. They're not actually sentient. They are basically a natural balance. Like vampires, they inhabit recently-deceased corpses, but instead of human corpses, they take animal corpses. They also reform their corpse, usually making it more formidible (longer claws, etc.). Whenever a were physically interacts with a vampire (i.e. mauls it) the were's body negates the etheric energy in the vampire, making the vampire unable to repair his host body. Anyway, this flashback involved me in the host body of an inuit (eskimo) who came upon a great-grandaddy among weres, and in the form of a oversized polar bear. The short of it: the mauling and dismemberment of my legs, but the shoving of a spear through the bear's jaw and into his brain. I spent the rest of that vampiric life a multilated hero pulled around on a dog sled.

Yes, my imagination is an expansive and interesting place to spend hours in semi-lucid ... :)